It looks like the evil members of Chicago’s Friends Of The Parks organization have won a significant victory over the heroic forces of George Lucas and his proposed Museum Of Narrative Art, as the Associated Press is reporting that a federal judge has allowed a lawsuit to move forward that would stop Lucas from building on the city’s lakefront. Lucas’ museum has been in the works since June of 2014, when he chose to built it in Chicago after San Francisco refused to give him the location he wanted. Chicago is a city of people-pleasers—assuming you like the right baseball team—so it quickly offered him a spot off of Lake Michigan near Soldier Field and the Shedd Aquarium. The spot is currently taken up by a whole lot of nothing, but the Friends Of The Parks filed a lawsuit in November of that year arguing that the museum would “emasculate” and “degrade” the lakefront.
Officials in Chicago have supported Lucas’ museum from the beginning and they’ve already approved the necessary zoning plans in order to build it, but in 2014 a judge ordered the city not to touch the land until the lawsuit was settled. Now, it looks like that might not happen for a while, if at all. The Associated Press story notes that all of these legal issues “could end up killing” the museum entirely, especially since it was stuff like this that convinced Lucas not to build it in San Francisco in the first place.
If the project does get canned, maybe Lucas will just decide to spite everyone in Chicago and move it somewhere that the city hates, like anywhere in southern Illinois. “Welcome to Carbondale, home of the George Lucas Museum Of Narrative Art for some reason” has a pretty good ring to it.